School Bans Sausage Rolls From Lunch Boxes

Bradford's Shirley Manor Primary Academy clearly likes to think it's as posh as its name suggests, as the school has launched an attack on the favoured food of the proles -- the sausage roll. The popular meat tube has been banned from appearing in the lunch boxes of children, alongside fellow processed meat favourite the pork pie.

Bizarre scenes have been reported at the school, with one child having a sausage roll confiscated by staff, leading the boy's dad, Steve Fryer, to say that the school should "stick to teaching kids" and stop poking around in their sandwich boxes for prohibited junk foods. Fryer explained: "He was given a ham sandwich instead but he hates ham so there's no way he was going to eat it. He ended up eating a dry crisp sandwich. How is that any healthier?"

You can see that it started with good intentions, though, as the school put together a food and drink policy [PDF] that encourages the inclusion of healthy choices in lunchboxes and came into force this month. It's a nice thing to care about what little people eat, as there's no better sight than a child struggling to eat an apple with a row of wobbly front teeth and getting juice all over its perfect little nose, but if it means arbitrarily swapping out foods and seizing prohibited pastries from sobbing kids, it's only creating a new raft of psychological problems to beleaguer their adulthoods.

If you want to be angry and all Concerned Dad about this, the comment section on The Argus scrolls for miles and miles, but all the angles have already been taken. [BBC]